Streams and Rivulets

A Contrapuntal Scansion Breakdown

Here is a breakdown of a poem that I could not wait to share with you all. This is Streams and Rivulets, published in Engine(idling, Issue #9 a few days ago. The issue required “collaboration” with another poet. JC reached out to me, and we ran with it.

Quick Note: If you could support both of us by nominating it for the Readers’ Choice Awards, that would make our day. The form is HERE

This poem holds one big trick, and several smaller ones. Firstly, it reads as three poems in total. The left poem, the right poem, and the WHOLE poem. It reads fully across left to right, as a contrapuntal. A poetic conversation between two voices that reads as a contiguous poem. What I wanted to share here is the movement of the poem, as one of the many things that this work does. How poems move our eyes towards a specific place, and our hearts to a specific space. There are three major emotional movements that take place in this poem. See a little hand-drawn representation.

1. The blue arrow going down is the hypo-arousal or depressional movement downward. When we read poems, we read them from top to bottom. There is an emotional space here of remembrance about a moment that includes hydrangeas and an old relationship.

2. The red arrow going across is the hyper-arousal or anger movement across. We read poems left to right, and there is a progression of emotion from sad to angry here. The voices change and mix between poems, as there is a sort of call and response. It’s the movement into the heightened arousal of the second voice.

3. The Green Arrow going diagonal represents the Growth Arc. This poem adds a dimension of trans-relational growth through the lens of memory. We both hurt, we both burn with anger, but we both move through this experience, and by the end of the poem you can almost feel the catharsis of having left it behind. One voice is sweating in the heat of the memory, the other is screaming in the stillness.

The other thing I want to draw your attention to is the pairing of syllabic line matching and lyrically focused slant rhyme. JC does a wonderful job of matching the first poem, with most of the lines being within 1-2 syllables of the line it’s responding to. Examples:

“ounce of will | powerless swill” (3/4)

“be cut for bouquets | be cut for decay” (5/5)

“forget beads of sweat, try streams and rivulets | forget needs, intent. Try screams, regret” (11/9)

With the help of Ani Beeler’s sharp editing skills, we were able to match lyrical lines with each other; matching subject, rhyme schema, and syllables all in the same lines.

That is very hard to do. I am so proud of the work I did here, and how, when I added it to the work others did, it was launched into the stratosphere by the talent, dedication, and passion of people that I have met on Substack! Truly, this represents (to me) one of the most wonderful aspects of this community. It helped me get my first-ever published poem.

-JNG